IBM researchers to report carbon feats at IEDM

MANHASSET, NY -- A couple of late submissions to the upcoming IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting will detail record-breaking performance in transistors made from carbon and its derivatives.

IBM researchers will describe record RF performance from transistors made from synthesized graphene. The researchers achieved a 280-GHz cutoff frequency in a 40-nm gate-length FET, the fastest ever reported from synthesized graphene, according to IBM.

The second research paper from IBM outlines the first experimental demonstration of sub-10-nm transistors made from carbon nanotubes. The researchers built devices that achieved more than four times the current density (2.41 mA/Ám) of the best competing silicon device, at a low operating voltage of 0.5 V. The researchers speculate that theoretical predictions were exceeded because the transistor gate modulates the charge not only in the channel but in the contact regions as well, which had not been considered previously.

Feynman said that there is plenty of room at the bottom. We are hitting the bottom and it is full of surprises. Graphene, CNT, Nanowires, variation of FinFET will compete for the lower technology nodes for sure.

The Silicon atom is about .24 nm. Carbon is about .14 - a bit more than half as big. It looks like there's still some room to make transistors smaller than the sub-10 nm. Not much though. I don't see any solids with a diameter smaller than carbon so that may be it for the traditional binary logic building block.
It's getting close to time to look for something that will give a couple more states from the same size device.